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Thursday, October 30, 2014

When
the doorbell rang, I’d hide. I was
afraid of men with facial hair. I was
afraid of the woods, the dark, drowning, being left alone, getting lost,
nuclear war, nightmares, painful death, losing my parents, being attacked by
animals, being excluded, not knowing what to say, being made fun of, frogs,
snakes, answering the phone, being abducted, ghosts, talking to strangers,
speaking my mind, mean kids, losing a friend, making new friends, being disliked,
boys liking me, boys not liking me, having sex, getting pregnant, failing
school, not getting into college, being a disappointment, being the worst at
everything, and so on and so forth, forever.

I
was a little angsty.

It’s
just my way, I guess. I was not born a daredevil, one to take unnecessary
risks. I liked what I knew, and worked
very hard at finding a comfy spot where I went.
Anything outside of my very rigid boundaries scared me.

What
a barrel of monkeys I was.

One
by one, I’ve left most of those fears behind.
Maturity has absorbed most of them; the interpersonal ones are long
gone, as are the ones that have to do with physicality or emotions.

As
we grow and become more comfortable in our own skin and in our place in the
world, we take more risks and rebel against our normal, expected behavior. We use our fears to drive our behavior and in
the process many of our fears dissolve.
By high school my friends and I would cruise the local university for
parties and college boys. I traveled to
Europe and became an exchange student. In college, conquering my fears with rebellion
and risk looked like a fake ID and cliff-diving.

My
fears rumbled under the surface, but I squashed them down in the name of
experience and growth, finding my own path, and following others. Am I the sort of person who would get a
tattoo? I wondered. Yes. Yes, I think I am. It only hurts for a little while. The needles are very safe.

I
sort of wish that I had listened to my fears on that one.

As
an adult I learned not to be afraid of most of the things that plagued me as a
kid. Part of the reason is my faith, the
belief that all things happen for a reason and for good, even if they are bad
things. Part of the reason is that fear
only serves to paralyze. Risks can have
amazing results and rebellion is sometimes taking the high road and coming out
better than before. Another part is that
I’ve learned how to handle so many things.
My experiences in conquering fears have taught me to adapt and be more
competent.

And
part of the reason is that I’m just tired of being afraid. I spent all my fears already.

Except
for the one about being attacked by animals.
Bears, mostly. And
velociraptors. You’ve seen Jurassic
Park, right? Terrifying.

Monday, October 27, 2014

I
descended the stairs of our plush-carpeted basement. At once, the odor hit me with all the weight and
cruelty of a body slam delivered by an unshowered pro-wrestler.

It
was the smell of a recently occupied litter box.

You
know the smell, right? The acrid stench
of peed and pooped-upon cat litter?

Oh,
you don’t? How nice for you.

As
I scooped the poop and clumped-up litter, I marveled at the volume of
feces.

And hated the occasion that caused me to do so.

I
cleaned the box, bagged the offending material, and ran up the stairs to
dispose of it outside, cat on my heels.
He’s a social guy, following every person around the house like a puppy.

He’s
so cute. Little did I know that I would
soon resent even the cuteness of this behavior.

Washing
my hands, I noticed that there was a piece of dirt on the floor that wasn’t
there before. I bent down to pick it up,
thought twice about it, and grabbed a tissue.

It
wasn’t dirt.

Aw,
man, I thought, as I gave the cat the side-eye.
Animals are SO GROSS, I screamed in my mind as I reached for the cleaning
wipes. I wiped the spot off the floor,
and the cat stood from his lounging area under the kitchen table, yawned, and
walked off. As I watched him, something
caught my attention.

It
was the world’s largest dingleberry, hanging off the fur on the back of his
legs. He left a little smeared
footprint as he sauntered off self-importantly.

Panicking,
I remembered how this cat had run all over the house just minutes before, on
top of every piece of furniture and scrap of carpeting inside. I grabbed him, lifted his tail, placed another
tissue on his back end, and ran up the stairs to the tub in the bathroom. Nononononononono NO. My voice escalated three octaves.

He
looked at me plaintively. Please don’t
do this, he pleaded with his eyes. I’m
scared.

I
turned on the water and firmly held his legs and tail in place as I ran the warm stream
over his backside, grabbing the bar of bath soap that would be sacrificed in
the ordeal. Ten minutes later the cat was
clean but wet. I rubbed him down, wrapped
him in a clean towel and shut him in the basement as I decided my plan of
attack.

Every
surface in the house was potentially besmirched with excrement, just waiting to
sully an unsuspecting victim. I smelled that smell everywhere. I wondered if a black light would be
effective to pinpoint the areas in most need of disinfecting, like on Dateline
when they use one to smugly point out that even the elegant Ritz is spattered with
bodily fluids.

Concluding
that the entire house was polluted, I resigned myself to my task, amassed all
the bleach-containing cleaning products we had, and grabbed the mop and
rags for a day of deep cleaning. And as
I crawled on my hands and knees with my nose to the thick carpeting in our basement
and living room, searching for land mines, I took solace in knowing that
tomorrow, with its promise of a sparkling house and a grooming appointment, would
soon be here.

It
is the start of a new era. This event is
behind us. It will not happen again.

Thursday, October 23, 2014

My daughter says that I was so cute thatall the boys probably loved me.Yeah, that's right.

My
parents were junior high school sweethearts who got married soon after high
school. They had kids, built a life and never looked back.

Total. Babes.

Still babes.

I
remember my childhood well. It was a
good one. I didn’t suffer at the hands
of abusive parents or family members, save for my brothers and I beating up on
each other from time to time. We had lots of family and friends who lived close
by. We had enough of everything we needed.

It
was a good, simple life – a great way to grow up.

It
is this childhood that largely influences the way I parent my kids today. Except for a few modern-day differences and
new information, I am mindful of my memories and draw upon them when I am faced
with a parenting challenge or question.
Although they were incredibly young and likely did this parenting thing
by the seat of their pants, what would my parents have done in the situations
that I face?

Try
as I might, I cannot realistically parent the same ways they can. I can for a lot of things – the needs of
children haven’t changed so much in forty years. But the world has changed in ways
that don’t allow for a carbon copy of parenting techniques. Parenting styles of the 1970s and 1980s don't always make sense in the 2000s.

So although I’ve tried to use my parents’ example to guide my own parenting life,
I’ve still done a lot of things differently. Here are five:

I’m an
older parent than they were. Sort
of. My mother was twenty years old when
she had my brother. She had me at
21. She had my little brother when she
was 29. I had our son when I was 27 and
our daughter just one week shy of 30. I
was not mother material before age 27. I
know this because pictures of what I was doing between 20 and 27 and pictures
of what my mother was doing during those ages are vastly different.

I don’t
smoke in the house. The perils of exposing
children to secondhand smoke are now well-documented, and I remember falling
asleep to the smell of smoke wafting up the stairs from my dad’s cigarettes as
he made work calls from the little desk in our kitchen. Every holiday was tinged with the familiar
scent, every get-together. We don’t have
friends or relatives who smoke anymore, but when I was young someone was always
flicking a cigarette. We didn’t even
think about it then; I can’t imagine how our children would react if all of the
adults suddenly lit up at a dinner party.

I don’t
use daycare. My mom stayed at home, like most mothers at
the time, and when I became pregnant, I just knew that that’s what I wanted to
do, too. However, my parents owned their
own business, and my mom started working in the office around the time my
younger brother was born. So they hired
teenagers in the summer and found a friend to care for my younger brother in
her home while my older brother and I were in school in the winter.

We are
more hands-on. I’ll never forget calling up my mom, worrying
about the age at which children these days need to use deodorant. I was concerned with body hair, age of
puberty onset, normal age of body changes, and on and on and on. Our kids are so young! I gasped. When did we start all that? I wanted to know. My mom hesitated before replying, “Well, I
don’t know! I wasn’t up you kids’ butts
the way parents today are up their kids’ butts!
Who knows when you started using deodorant? I never even noticed!” Huh.
Point taken.

We talk
about uncomfortable subjects. In my
day parents just didn’t talk about certain things with their kids. Sex and drugs weren’t mentioned, and parents
didn’t share deep thoughts. In our
house, we all talk about every subject imaginable and my husband and I field
questions from our kids that I wouldn’t have dreamed of asking my own
parents. In addition, we share big
plans, money issues, and how we screwed up in the past. Maybe we share too much, but I can’t imagine
being less open with my kids.

How do you parent differently than your parents
did?

Do you think you do a better or worse job, or is
it just different?

*******

This post inspired by:

Mama Kat's Writing Workshop

Prompt #5: List 5 ways
you are different as a parent than your parents were.

I
think both of those reasons are the same, but eh, I don’t care about being
redundant. Whoomp! There it is.

Let’s get started, shall we?***

A
few of my favorite things:

1.
Sit-down Restaurant: I like the “sit-down” qualifier of this item,
as opposed to “stand-up” restaurant, which would be my kitchen,
because I eat many meals standing at my kitchen counter, scarfing food into my
trap because when the hungries take control who can find the time to sit down
properly and eat? Really,
though, when we moved to the eastern part of Pennsylvania a million years ago,
I was pleasantly surprised to find that most pizza places around here make the
kind of pizza I remembered from the Jersey Shore vacations of my youth. Huge slices with a thin crust, just the
perfect amount of sauce and cheese and seasonings. You fold it up and eat it like a pizza
sandwich and here it is early morning and I’m drooling over it already. We’ve tried all of the pizza joints around
here, and we’ve never been disappointed.

2.
Cookie: I love a good sugar cookie. I hate making them. But my mom is really good at making them, and
she can bang out a batch in an hour, so I just eat them when she makes them,
which isn’t often since I live far away from her. Which happens to be a blessing because I can
eat twelve at a time.

OMG

3.
Bath product scent: Lavender.
I just love it. I ten-O loooooooooove
lavender. The color, the flower, the
smell, the beautiful lavender fields.
When I die please let heaven be lavender-scented. I shall be a lavender farmer there. Lavender lavender lavender.

5.
Flower/plant: I get a kick out of growing tropical plants outside
in our temperate climate. It gets very
hot and humid in the summer, which is perfect for them, but you have to bring
them inside in the winter so they don’t freeze and die. If I adopt any more tropical plants we may
need to build a greenhouse. I’m not
kidding.

6.
Bad-for-me snack: Candy.
All kinds. I don’t even care if it’s
the gross kind, like those weird gross gummies that my kids bring home from
trick-or-treating. But I kind of do
care. Can we stop the gross gummies on
Halloween already? Mama likes
Butterfingers.

7.
Magazines: I stopped reading magazines because they took
up so much of my time. My husband is
always trying to buy me magazine subscriptions from his leftover airline
miles. I’m all, No way, man! I cannot spend another twelve hours of my life reading the fall issue of Vogue.

8.
Hobby (besides blogging): I like to party.

9.
Holiday. Easter and Halloween. Each is my favorite for different reasons,
but mostly because of the low stress/high candy factors.

10.
Girls’ Night Out Activity. Anything as long as it involves conversation. I love a good Girls’ Night In, actually,
where someone invites me to her house because I always stress about having
people over and not having enough food/drinks even though I usually have enough
food/drinks for a small team of oxen and their drivers. Going out with women can be a huge pain because of the bill. Women hate to split the bill, and invariably there's someone who's all, "Oh, I ate before I came, and I only had one drink and shared a salad. So my portion comes to six-eighty." If you are this person, stop it right now. Split the bill.

11.
Date Night. Dinner and a movie. And for the love of everything holy, if it’s
a date, the MAN ASKS THE WOMAN AND TAKES CARE OF EVERYTHING. Don’t ask me if I want to go out, and then expect
ME to arrange all the details and OMG, I have to PAY, TOO?

Like
I said, I’m old school.

Tag,
you’re it! Join in the fun and link up
with either Elaine or Krystyn and share your own favorite things! Be sure to use #OSBlog on Twitter and tweet with @SeriousKrystyn or @elainea if that’s
your speed.And when you’re done with
that, call me up.We’ll party.

Thursday, October 16, 2014

I
showed my son a picture that a friend posted on Facebook, of a huge pile of
Legos that her kids made in the middle of a floor. It was so deep that you couldn’t see the
carpet. It had to be three or four feet
in diameter. Several pieces were scattered
nearby.

“Boy
am I glad that you guys never got into Legos.
We never really had a mess like that.
So many pieces!” I gaped in
wonder at the photo, remembering my own youth when my brothers and I would sit
among the tiny plastic pieces and lose ourselves in building. My brothers built cars and spaceships. I built houses.
Our kids only occasionally played with the sets we bought for them. They made messes for sure during the younger
years, but thankfully they rarely contained thousands of Legos.

Look! No Legos!

My
son glanced at the picture. “That’s
because when we would get a set of Legos, we’d put them together and then you’d
break them down and put them away. What
was the point?”

In an instant I felt like I had robbed our children of great futures, fulfilling careers. They will not be architect and engineer, nor astronaut and urban planner.

I hated Legos as a mom,
because they were everywhere. It’s in my
character, my habit, to insist on neatened spaces before the day ends, to start
with a clean slate each day. I spent
hours when the kids were little, picking up after them. No mess saw the dark of night. This is an issue when it comes to Lego
building. Lego projects are ongoing, and
to me ongoing projects are just a mess.

I
hated the Lego projects they constructed – they took up so much room and
collected so much dust. They’d put the
things together and just sort of – leave them out. Within days I’d lose it and break them all
down and throw them into a bin with all the others. My kids never reconstructed a particular set again after I interfered. Eventually
they stopped playing with them.

My
brother was over recently and I gave him the bin of Legos we were going to donate. His kids are much younger than mine, and he
thought that maybe one of them would inherit his love for building. I was happy to see them go.

An
advertisement came on the TV for a movie that my kids loved when they were
younger. “Oh look! I haven’t seen that movie in forever!” my
daughter exclaimed. “But don’t we have
it on DVD? You could watch it anytime,”
I said. “We had it until you sold it
at a GARAGE SALE, Mom!” she retorted.
She went on to list all the beloved movies we bought at one time and
that I got rid of before they were ready to give them up.

I
had no idea that I was thwarting my children’s spirit growth with every pile of
toys I cleaned up and with every dust-covered DVD I sold for a quarter. I
thought I was keeping order in our home, and I am ruining their memories
instead.

Is
it any wonder the term Mommy Guilt is a thing?

I’ve
taken away bedtime snacks, forbade messy crafts, only rarely join them outside to
play, make them change their own sheets and clean their own bathroom, insist
they eat salad, have made them work when they have friends over, and our history
of amusement park visits is meager. They
will never forget these indignities, and they will make sure I won’t, either.

But
that’s okay. Through it all, they’re
learning valuable lessons: that you can’t save everything and do
everything. Disappointment is inevitable. Work is an integral part of life.

Monday, October 13, 2014

Recently
I had a text conversation with a friend that lasted over an hour.

It
was okay; not ideal. Typing the words, one finger at a time on the tiny screen – switching screens to use : or ; or “ and ” – it took more time than
it should have. Sometimes our thoughts
collided and the text bubbles got out of order and one of us got off topic
before the other was ready to move on.
Several times one of us had to ask the other: what did you mean by that? We’d back up and reword again.

I
wanted to use the word “preposterous,” but settled for “cray.”

I
missed the olden days when I could talk on the phone with a friend and
punctuation was unspoken, and words flowed freely from my lips, and
interruptions were effortless and one of the quirks that I tolerated in a good
friend during an easy yet meaningful discussion.

People don’t want to talk on the phone anymore. More and more people claim to hating and avoiding it, despite likely doing it for hours when they
were younger. They cite convenience
and ease when they eschew talking in favor of texting.

In
theory, I get it. The conversation I had
with my friend could have easily been done while I was perusing the clearance
end caps at Target, sneaking my way from the toy aisle to that one area in
housewares that everybody forgets about and where I find most of my treasures.

Or
if I was more adept at texting and could do the talk with one hand down a
toilet in my house, scrubbing away my family’s dirt while she unloaded hers
onto the screen.

Instead,
I sat at my kitchen table in silence and punched out my words in response to
hers, enjoying the quiet but wishing we could hear each other laugh instead of sharing
LOLZ and hearing the sarcasm without having to type You’re kidding, right? Dang. Cray.

I
miss my mom. When I was a new adult she
would call and I would sit on the secondhand patio furniture that I kept in my
apartment, painting my toenails and telling her that I made her lasagna for
dinner and expressing my shock that it was such a large amount and I would
likely be eating it for the next two weeks. I learned how to cook over the phone, that
windows needed to be washed periodically, and that a civilized person really
could not do without a good tailor.

Now
my mother rarely calls anymore; she’s able to run more errands and get more
work done due to the convenience afforded by technology. I can almost hear the world rush by her car
window when she calls, my name on in a list of many that she checks off when
she drives to the collect the dry cleaning.

When
my husband and I met, he had just landed a new job, and they set him up in a hotel for a couple of months. Ours was a long distance romance, and the
hotel phone bill soared as we chatted late into the night about our hopes and
dreams and those times we did those things we regret. His company was gracious enough to know that
our romance was fated from the beginning and forgave us the bill.

Now
he texts from his parked car at the end of a long day: Just lvng b home @ 630.

You
may chalk this loss up to the perils of familiarity in a marriage, but I
maintain that convenience is to blame.

We’re
out of practice. No more do friends call
to chat on a slow afternoon. It’s all
business, and more abbreviated than ever. Meet for lunch @ noon? Sat ok for GNO? Yah thx.

We’re
not able to totally hide our poor spelling ability with texting, and we expose
our rudeness when in the presence of others, every lull in conversation permission
to pick up our screens to see who else is talking. Worse, we endanger others when our attention
is diverted by the convenience of instant conversation when on the road.

Most
people argue that convenience is a good thing.
We’re doing more because we can; we’re not tied up by a phone cord, and conversations
can’t drag on via text because it’s too cumbersome. We are more efficient than ever, getting our
point across or making an order with a tap or two. We can easily beg off with a “gtg” because we
are at checkout, or entering the movie theater, the doctor’s office, or class. We don’t have to exercise real grace,
manners, or politeness anymore; abbreviations are substituted for real emotions
or reactions. OMG!!! and xoxo, srsly.

Nobody seems to mind.

For
now, I’ll be riding the waves of progress most of the time, and exhausting my
efforts by swimming against the tide when I feel indignant. When I can, I’ll call up my mom and
remind her that she still needs to give me her recipe for cheesy potatoes.

And
she’ll tell me she’s shopping with a friend, and that I should just Google it.

Tuesday, October 7, 2014

I was given a review copy of Get the Behavior You Want… Without Being the Parent You Hate! for the purpose of this review. I was not compensated in any other way for this post; all opinions and words are my own.

*******

The
day I realized that parents need to take the responsibility to parent
themselves first was the day this whole parenting thing made sense to me.

I
was at home with a toilet-training child.
There were accidents, endless loads of laundry, spot-cleaning on every
surface, and more than a few tears. I
was at wits’ end, and I did what any self-respecting parent would do – I called
my mother.

My
mom is nothing if not a hard truth-teller.
Her ability to use perfect common sense in every situation astounds
me. This time was no exception. “To train a child to do anything, you have to
train yourself first,” she said. Dense
as I am, I didn’t understand. “What do you mean?” I squeaked.

“You need to take your kid to the bathroom! Train
yourself to stop what you’re doing
consistently throughout the day – every half-hour if you have to – over and over
and over, to help your child practice!!” She replied exasperatedly. How did I raise such a stupid person? I
imagined her thinking.

Our
two-year-old was toilet-trained in a weekend.

Before
my kids were born, and throughout the first year of their lives, I read
parenting books. Well, baby how-to
books, really. DIY parenting. How to know if a fever is doctor-worthy, what
sorts of reactions are normal after immunizations, how much sleep a child needs
through stages of development. I browsed
baby development websites to know what to expect, and even read humor books
about the ups and downs of being a mom to remind me that I wasn’t crazy, failing
miserably, or both.

Then
life got real, and I stopped reading books and spent more time learning from my
children, other moms, my own mother, my mother-in-law, our grandmothers, aunts,
and really any female that I saw toting a child around. I parented on the fly, and cobbled together
tips and tricks that I learned to get through especially tough times.

Over
time, my husband and I developed our own brand of child-rearing, one that mostly works
in our house with our particular family configuration and growing and
changing individual personalities. We’ve succeeded and failed many times
over. We can always use improvement.

From
the beginning, Dr. G speaks the truth that we are all parenting experts on the
kids in our homes. She reveals that, as
a family doctor, her experience is that everyone struggles with parenting. This last fact is incredibly comforting to me;
although I might be an expert on my kids, there are definitely some situations
where I find myself throwing my hands up in the air and screeching, “NOW WHAT?”

The
book is organized into four parts. The
first three cover the importance of teaching children the three mainstays of
good behavior: Respect, Responsibility, and Resilience, which happen to be three
spotlight areas in our house populated with middle-schoolers. The fourth part explains how to make changes
happen, starting with parents. Can our
kids count on us to do what we say we will? Ultimately, can we be the parents
we want to be?

With
this book, Dr. G reinforces the lesson my mother taught me those years ago –
that when we structure ourselves, we can structure our kids’ lives. All parents can learn what it is to be a fully
formed, responsible adult from this book, along with tips on learning how to be
an effective parent.

If
you’re a parent, read Dr. G’s book. Never
preachy, it’s written in a warm, practical tone that is down-to-earth and funny
in some places, like in a “we’re all in this together, here’s what happened to us
and how we dealt with it” kind of way.
You trust her point of view because of her experience and profession. Her ability to make even the hairiest parenting
issue seem doable is confidence-building, that even your NOW WHAT?? moments can
be corrected and handled by YOU, the parent.

Get the Behavior You Want… Without Being the Parent You Hate! is available on Amazon.

*******

If
you’re not aware of Dr. Deborah Gilboa’s presence on social media, I hope you
become aware. Her 2-minute YouTube videos are not to be missed. Her
guest segments on news programs nationwide cover interesting parenting topics
and information as well. And she speaks
and gives seminars on parenting. Find
her on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and her site.

Thursday, October 2, 2014

The
day I decided to drink a pot of coffee at home before going out into the world
where coffee is free.

Like
I do every day. Except coffee isn’t free
every day. I mean, unless you steal
it. And who would do that?

Like
a boob, I read several Facebook posts from people rhapsodizing about National
Coffee Day and I read the lists of places where it was free. Most of those places are convenient to my home. Wow, I thought to
myself. One could just drink free coffee
all day.

And
like a boob, I didn’t even take part.

“Who
cares,” you may think. “What’s the big
deal? So you missed a measly free cup of
coffee. Take a chill pill, woman. Slow your roll.”

To
that I say Excuse me, good sir. Coffee
is very important. Very.

Do
people still say chill pill?

When
I was a kid, coffee was a thing. Seemingly
as important as water, the black liquid filled cups and mugs and pots and was
present before, at or after each meal. Was it
used for digestive purposes? A
pick-me-up? Every adult I knew drank
it. Most took theirs black. Coffee was present at every holiday
gathering, every church dinner. Every
waitress at every restaurant wielded a brown-handled glass carafe filled with
steaming hot coffee. A small bowl filled
with tiny plastic containers of coffee creamer on every table served as entertainment and I
built teetering towers using every one.

After high school I sat across from a friend
and watched as he chewed a tiny hole in the bottom of a creamer and squirted
the contents into his cup. We would talk
and laugh and drink mugs of cream and sugar and a little coffee and smoke
cigarettes between bites of our omelets at Denny’s because you could do that
back then.

Coffee
time at my husband’s grandmother’s house is a big deal, and has been for
years. Her children and grandchildren
and great-grandchildren spill out of the farmhouse kitchen on weekend mornings and they
make pots and pots of coffee, one right after the other. She has the kind of coffeemaker that can
make a pot of coffee in three minutes.

My
husband and I stopped taking cream and sugar in our coffee several years ago,
when we discovered that we drank a lot of coffee and could not really afford
the added calories. We learned how to
drink it black. We got one of those
three-minute coffeemakers, too.

I
start each day with a cup (pot) of coffee.
It’s a comfort, a desire, a love.

And
I missed National Coffee Day.

Like
a boob.

*******

This post inspired by:

Mama Kat's Writing Workshop

Prompt #1: September 29th
is National Coffee Day. How do you like
your cup?